Joanna and Phineas Sprague

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Finneas and Joanna Sprague are the co founders of Portland Yacht Services. Thanks for coming in today. I think you like to be called Finn, is that right? Okay. Nice to have you.

Joanna Sprague:

Thank you very much.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I'm really intrigued by all the work that you have put into Portland's waterfront. And this is something that you've been doing for many years. You've been married for 42 years. Did we decide that was how long ago?

Joanna Sprague:

Yep. Long time.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And you've always been joined by the water?

Joanna Sprague:

Yes. In fact, when we first came back from sailing, it was hard to be more than 72ft apart because you were

Phineas Sprague:

used to being 72ft apart, right? As far apart as we got for many years.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You met in Florida, where you were working as a nurse. Joanna.

Joanna Sprague:

That's correct.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And, Finn, you were sailing around the world.

Phineas Sprague:

I had the idea that we could sail around the world in 18 months, and it didn't work out that way. But we. We did meet in Florida.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And you also got married on board your vessel?

Joanna Sprague:

On Maria. In Bali.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

In Bali.

Joanna Sprague:

And most of his. All of your family was there and just my parents. And it was Christmas.

Phineas Sprague:

Christmas Day.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

That's very romantic.

Joanna Sprague:

It's romantic. It was part of what we sort of said, come visit us at Christmas time. It wasn't easy to find a minister. We weren't sure he was going to show up, but he did. So we then brought out. Did we have a ring? Yes, we did have a ring. So we did get married. But it was a surprise to Everybody.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Joanna, your background was in. You said outboarding.

Joanna Sprague:

Well, my parents had a little marina and campgrounds in Canada, and I grew up on the water. I delivered papers and outboard. And then it shut down in the winter and we would go to Florida. Then they'd come back up and open it up. So I grew up working in a little store.

Phineas Sprague:

OMC dealer.

Joanna Sprague:

Yeah. My dad gave us all of his old manuals, and he even brought a motor to us one time on Mariah, a folding motor, which was one of the first ones ever, ever, ever. But. And then I went to nursing school, so I had some nursing background, getting on the boat.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So I guess what I wonder is, weren't you taking kind of an enormous leap of faith by getting on that boat that first time 42 years ago with this man that you had just met?

Joanna Sprague:

You're right, because the boat was already in Panama at the time. And Finn called and asked if I would help him get the boat across the Pacific. And I said sure.

Phineas Sprague:

Got off the phone, where are the Marquesas?

Joanna Sprague:

Got off the phone, had to look it up on a map because I had no idea where the Marquesas were. And that's near Tahiti. But I never got off. So four years later, we sailed back into Portland.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So do you think that actually strengthened your marriage, the fact that you spend all of that time together in a pretty small.

Phineas Sprague:

But we've had back each other's backs in most difficult circumstances.

Joanna Sprague:

Absolutely. You know, there's no question that, as I said, we weren't ready to be apart when we came back, sailing around the world. And that was the hardest part for me, to go off every day and go to a job and not see them for eight hours. It was very different than our life together for the first four or five years was we were always together and we always. Being on a boat, you also know who's in charge. And in a house, it's a little different.

Phineas Sprague:

Right. We've had an agreement since we were married, and that is that she did all the little decisions and I did all the big ones. And after 42 years, there's really been no big decisions. And any time I thought there was a big decision, I got really big trouble for it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So it just sounds like you're doing all the decisions now, Joanna.

Joanna Sprague:

No, I've had to, really.

Phineas Sprague:

She's the admiral. She's the admiral. And she, you know, I look at the horizon and she looks at my feet to make sure that I don't trip.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So you complement each other well.

Joanna Sprague:

Well, We've been at it a long time. We know, we know who's better at other things. So we let each other take over roles. But it is, it's those first few years being married was.

Phineas Sprague:

We weren't apart and it was also dangerous, you know. You know, we were in a situation in the seventies in, in Indonesia and Red Sea and places that no sane. We were right off Timor when that was invaded. So, you know, it was. And then we got in a cyclone in the, you know, we got some pretty bad storms and you know, we

Joanna Sprague:

were one of the first cruising boats to go through the Suez Canal after it reopened. And it was a little frightening. There were lots of stories of guns and, you know, boat hooks.

Phineas Sprague:

Right. People that didn't, you know, couldn't comprehend a yacht even the concept of, you know, are you sailing around the world because you. Why, you know, what are you doing? We're having a hard enough time living and you have the resources to do what?

Joanna Sprague:

You know, would I do it again? No. I mean, I think the world is a lot scarier now. I wouldn't want to be at any of these places. I mean, you know, we get that question all the time and there's too much unrest, there's too much dislike out there.

Phineas Sprague:

I slept with a pistol under my pillow all the way up the Red Sea and not knowing what I would do if I had to use it. You know, boats that we were with and around got machine gunned and, and I think it was a young person's, you know, concept that you would.

Joanna Sprague:

We were young.

Phineas Sprague:

Yeah, you were.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

How old were you?

Phineas Sprague:

You could live forever.

Joanna Sprague:

We were in our 20s when we were doing this. So back in 77. 77.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And what did your families think of this voyage around the world?

Joanna Sprague:

As I said, I'm the youngest in my family, so my mom was. Okay. They came to visit us a few times. Same with your family. I think you had always talked about sailing around the world as a kid.

Phineas Sprague:

Well, I was always independent and you know, my parents, I guess they'd probably be put in jail for what they let me do as a child. You know, they let me go out and I was allergic to everything that was on the farm. So I would. At age 6, I was out rowing a boat around in Cape Elizabeth offshore in the southwest breeze so that I wouldn't, so my eyes wouldn't get all clouded up. Then I ended up up in the Allagash all by myself doing mapping for the main geological survey. I was down the coal mines in West Virginia. They Basically figured that the first pancake was the one that you always threw out, so it'd be okay. There was, you know, a bunch of us or six of us.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Do you mean you were the oldest child, so you were the first pancake?

Phineas Sprague:

Right. And then. But the, you know, the experience that they allowed me to do made me very independent. And I think that, you know, they trusted me, but they would never allow more than three of the kids on the boat at any one time

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

just in case something bad happened.

Phineas Sprague:

And, you know, and it was dangerous.

Joanna Sprague:

You know, we didn't have the communications that we have now on boats. You know, we had a ham radio and we had a single side band that didn't work. If we got the skip right, we could call home. And that was one of the harder things for all of us was not having that communication. And I think, you know, if you talk to our parents, you know, it was a big deal when we did make the phone calls.

Phineas Sprague:

Right.

Joanna Sprague:

So we. We tried, you know, we tried to call them when we'd get into a port so they knew where we were.

Phineas Sprague:

And there were great ham radio operators in South Portland.

Joanna Sprague:

That was a whole different level that

Phineas Sprague:

would help us to communicate. And, you know, nowadays, you know, you can basically, with Iridium phones and all of this stuff, you have instant gratification from anywhere in the world. Whereas when we were sailing, we were the last, I call it, class of boat that use celestial navigation.

Joanna Sprague:

Right, Right.

Phineas Sprague:

So. And celestial teaches you to be very, very cautious. And, you know, there can. And there can be many days when you don't have a good fix. And it can be quite dangerous when you're making approaches to land. So, you know, things have changed. You know, a lot of people that don't have the maritime skills are able to get out on the water and go great distances. Now,

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

celestial navigation is by the stars. So not having a good fix is maybe you can't see the stars. Well.

Phineas Sprague:

Well, you don't. You can't see the stars and you don't. You're not able to locate your position on the nautical chart with any accuracy. So if you're approaching the coast or something in the storm, what you usually do is try to make contact with a lighthouse or something that flashes 20 miles off. So if you're 20 miles off course, you can see the light, and then you can readjust and go on with the sailing soundings, which is a different form of navigation. But the real danger is that it is just that period when you're approaching shallow water and you Also use the

Joanna Sprague:

sun and the moon.

Phineas Sprague:

You can use all sun, planet, moons, jet con trails, you know, whatever tool that you have.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Tell me about the Portland Yacht Services. Tell me about how this came to be.

Phineas Sprague:

Well, When we got back, it turned out that my grandfather Thomas's company that he sold, which is a Portland company, was for sale. And United Industrial Syndicate owned it. And they had built this machine that reached out and grabbed people, so it was a huge liability. So they had to shut the company down. And so because my family had been in the energy business for years in the coal mines and my grandfather had sold it, we were looking for something positive to do. And the Portland company was building nuclear power plant components at the time, and it had actually built the first commercial nuclear power plant in New England, Yankee Row, the reactor. And so my parents decided that they wanted to acquire the property and build nuclear power plant components. And so because I was a geologist and studied petrology and all of these things, it fit that I was working in operations. And after Three Mile island, the whole industry shut down in the United States. And the Portland Company, Portland Engineering Company went out of business.

Joanna Sprague:

That was the name of it.

Phineas Sprague:

And I had seen so many decisions that I didn't understand and didn't. Couldn't articulate reasons for. I went to school, went back to school, went to Northern Northeastern and got an MBA and was sort of starving to death. And so the somebody in the yacht club asked me to put a fender on a Boston Whaler in my basement. And so I did that. And then a person that I've known for years, Eddie Rowe, who was running the yacht club, doing the maintenance and the yacht club, I had a heart attack. And they said, will you take it over? And I'm going, well, you know, it's food, right? And so I started to do that out of our house while I was getting my mba, and I got asked to go work for General Dynamics in Quincy, to work to do the quality assurance for the submarine submarines, and went down there and decided that none of these people were like Bath Ironworks and they didn't understand they weren't doing good quality work and they would eat a young person alive.

Joanna Sprague:

Plus, we didn't want to move, and we couldn't.

Phineas Sprague:

We couldn't move. We didn't want to move.

Joanna Sprague:

But we have a lovely spot right where we live, where we brought up our kids. And it's. One of the questions is totally, you know, I'd stay there forever. And we didn't really want to leave Maine.

Phineas Sprague:

So I. So I was Working on boats and at the yacht club. And somebody asked me to rebuild a boat. And, you know, I started to. We moved into an old potato barn in Cape Elizabeth and, you know, we're working on people's boats and came to the attention of the town zoning person and they found out, they said it was not appropriate to. To build boats in or work on boats in a barn on a saltwater farm. And so we had to scoot into an empty building in Portland, which is the Portland company, and moved overnight out of there and then later went back in and changed the zoning, but it was too late for us.

Joanna Sprague:

So when we moved to 58, four, we were only in a couple of the buildings. Most of them were leased at that point.

Phineas Sprague:

Or abandoned.

Joanna Sprague:

Or abandoned. And Portland Yacht Services came out of that. We took on boat lines, motor lines.

Phineas Sprague:

We actually didn't have access to the water at that point.

Joanna Sprague:

And within five years was the beginning of when the little choo choo train came. And Fin was the guy that brought that here and hauled it down commercially.

Phineas Sprague:

Irv Bitfrog. I know that Ed Ashley and a whole bunch of other people were.

Joanna Sprague:

But it had a home, right? And that's when you started to get the rights across.

Phineas Sprague:

I kept, you know, I kept getting diverted by nonprofit activities. You know, the schooner Bowdoin. I was on the board there and got that rebuilt and got up with Jim Stevens and Nugent and the light ship, the Nantucket Lightship and Spring Point Museum.

Joanna Sprague:

But that's all been coming out of the 58 for Portland yacht Services. And as our tenants moved out Sail Main, we moved into the buildings and

Phineas Sprague:

there's no sewer there. We had to put a. It was pumping the raw sewage overboard for years. And you couldn't lease any property there until you put the new pumping station and connected all the heads. The place has fallen apart around our ears. It was quite a struggle.

Joanna Sprague:

And in 31 years ago, we asked about doing a little boat show. And the little boat show had a dozen boat builders from Maine. Just stand at a table, no boats.

Phineas Sprague:

Boat builders. And Nat Wilson, a sailmaker from Booth Bay. And these are our friends David Nutt and Dragon works.

Joanna Sprague:

And within four years we had moved close to 60 exhibitors with boats. And we started to utilize the space. But that was just for one weekend. And the boat building industry changed. People came to meet the boat builders, which many of these guys wouldn't step foot outside of their shop, let alone the state. So it was really an opportunity for that industry to get a spotlight on. And that was another big change for us to utilize the buildings. But the boatyard continued to grow, right?

Phineas Sprague:

And we got into a situation where we had to move the boats all outside in order to invite our competitors in to a boat show. So it was. It grew and grew and grew until at one point, I think we had a 240, probably 240 exhibitors, and every single niche and cranny was filled with a boat. So.

Joanna Sprague:

And outside and inside, right. On docks. We had boats on docks in March.

Phineas Sprague:

Unusual.

Joanna Sprague:

Not very often, but. And then we also.

Phineas Sprague:

But the thing is that Joanna would run. She would do all the work to set the boat show up all year long, put everything out, get everything organized, get. Get the. Get the layout of the place going until like a week before the boat show and everybody else was working on boats. And then suddenly it was like a good. The starting gun would go off. We drop all of our tools, we'd move all the boats outside, we'd throw a party for three days, which was with our friends in the boating industry. And then everything would go back into the building and we'd go work on boats again. So it was almost a month that we would spend not working, you know, with the whole organization. And then.

Joanna Sprague:

And we worked diligently with the neighborhood because that neighborhood, you know, isn't used to the end and tons of people that would come from away, and we

Phineas Sprague:

had to work, and we were imposing on them, right? And so we had to be really careful, you know, and it was hard because you get people that are, you know, really focused on coming to this boat show, and they don't really care where they park, and they don't really care that they've gone up onto the grass and somebody's lawn. You know, it's. And it's March, and it's March, so it's mud season. So, you know, it's a difficult thing.

Joanna Sprague:

We booked on to this. The beginning of the boat show. We put the flower show. We did that for 17 years.

Phineas Sprague:

That was Joanna's love, you know, I will work in a garden when I can't stand up in a boat.

Joanna Sprague:

It was a whole different crowd of people, too. You know, boats, yeah, they're artists. They're rough around the edges. The green industry is a little different, but it was something we worked at, and I think it was something that the Junior league had come to us. But they wanted the buildings for a month. We couldn't shut down our business for a month. We could shut it down for a week. And especially if we had Two shows back to back that worked. So we did that for a long time. And my.

Phineas Sprague:

Actually the boats, Carnies. Carneys, we call ourselves carnies for two weeks. But it was, you know, you didn't do it enough. So you became jaded. And you also were. Because it's been going on for 30 more years. The people that come into the show as exhibitors have become close friends.

Joanna Sprague:

We've seen a whole new generation. Their children are taking over their businesses or their children are doing other things in the marine industry, just like our kids. I mean, it's been really a piece that we work at also is just education. We're finding that the boat building industry needs to keep promoting themselves. You know, you're going to lose the art of building with wood. And we work hard at the whole idea of education, where to get those kids. You know, we work hard at with PASS here in Portland trying to find kids.

Phineas Sprague:

We helped start the Marine systems program at pass and you know, we find that the real issue is you take. You have to start with a small boat and then basically have the opportunity to look at the marine industry as a possible career. And, you know, people don't remember that World War II was carnage and Maine supplied a lot of merchant marine that never came back. And the mothers would tell their kids, I don't want you to go out in a boat with your uncle. I want you to go work in a mill. So many of the towns like around Maine, basically, if you go look at them, the anchorages are full of boats from away and the kids are throwing rocks in the water because they really know that they have a attachment to it and yet they don't know how to get out onto it. And so, you know, it's been. One of the things that we've been trying to do is to reconnect the young people in Maine with, you know, a place where you don't have to mow.

Joanna Sprague:

That's where Sailman came in and started that very early on and had worked with them for years.

Phineas Sprague:

Years.

Joanna Sprague:

Because the kids from the hill would

Phineas Sprague:

come down and throw rocks through the windows at the building.

Joanna Sprague:

Okay, we got to figure out what to do with these kids. They're bored. They want to be in the water. They don't know how. Until they started tiny little boat building projects.

Phineas Sprague:

We worked with the University of Southern Maine and we worked with the city of Portland, the Parks and Rec and. And you know, a whole bunch of great people to.

Joanna Sprague:

So now we have worldwide sailors, you know, nationally known sailors.

Phineas Sprague:

We've got Some of the finest sailors in the world coming out of Portland, Maine. And that's basically because we changed the model a little bit. All of the high schools sailed together. So when I was at Portland, a child, I would sail and there'd be one other person in the whole group that would challenge you. And now there's probably six or eight or 10 high schools that are all supplying excellent sailors and they all challenge themselves. So they end up being, you know, world class sailors because. And that's the model that's really different. You know, my high school TABOR has always attracted great sailors from say, Bermuda and other places in the world to sail. But even still, there's only two or three people that, that are really good and they don't have the opportunity to tune themselves up. Whereas this program is really tuning the kids up to be excellent, excellent sailors.

Joanna Sprague:

Some of the kids go on to Maine Maritime.

Phineas Sprague:

Maine Maritime and in landing boat school,

Joanna Sprague:

huge support funneling them, getting them kids right into that school.

Phineas Sprague:

Universities, good jobs of Maine for the, in the marine sciences. And so the, you know, you can't sort of take someone who's 18 and suddenly think that they're going to have both sense and you know, they're, they're, they're all thumbs and it takes a long time to get that original boat sense. So really in my view have to start in 8 to 14, if not sooner, in a very small tippy boat.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I hope that people who have been listening will be intrigued enough to go down and take a look at the work that you've done down at Portland Yacht Services. I've been speaking with Phineas and Joanna Sprague who are the co founders of Portland Portland Yacht Services. You've done a lot of good work for our city, so I really appreciate it and for the state of Maine. Thank you and thank you for coming in today.

Joanna Sprague:

Thank you.